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Gymnasts’ Lawsuits Show That Safeguarding Protocols Are No Substitute for Justice
Two gymnasts are suing USA Gymnastics, the U.S. Center for SafeSport, their former training facility, and the facility’s owners after their former coach was indicted on multiple counts of child pornography. The gymnasts allege that USA Gymnastics and the Center received complaints about Sean Gardner’s sexualized behavior towards minor athletes as early as 2017. Because these governing bodies did not fulfill their duty of care — including their duties as mandatory reporters — Gardner was able to get another job in another state, where he sexually abused the plaintiffs and other athletes for several years.
The federal charges against Gardner stem from images he recorded in 2017 and 2018 while coaching in Mississippi.
After leaving that gym, he started working in Des Moines in September 2018. Almost immediately, according to the lawsuits, he began coaching, grooming, and abusing the plaintiffs. Just as rapidly, gymnasts and parents started informing the gym’s owners of Gardner’s inappropriate behavior. Because the owners did not “investigate, [report] the abuse to the law enforcement authorities, remove Gardner as a coach, or take any other action,” Gardner continued to abuse the plaintiffs (and other gymnasts) until they left the gym in 2020 and 2021.
The U.S. Center for SafeSport received complaints about Gardner from the gym in Mississippi in December 2017 and from minor athletes and the parents of minor athletes at the gym in Des Moines in September 2020, March 2022, and August 2022.
The gym fired Gardner in July 2022 after the Center issued a “temporary suspension,” which immediately barred him from all sporting activities. Despite remaining in a temporary status for three years until his arrest this summer, the Center’s sanction removed him from sport.
The U.S. Center for SafeSport is a non-profit that is the national sport safeguarding organization under the Ted Stevens Act of 2018. Over 11 million Americans — from youth athletes to professional coaches — fall under its jurisdiction through their membership or employment by a sport’s governing body.
The crux of the suits is that the Center could have sanctioned Gardner at any point in the preceding four and a half years. The Center can impose a temporary suspension — which, for all practical purposes, is indistinguishable from a permanent ban while it is in place — on the basis of an allegation alone: no investigation or adjudication was necessary.
The suits are the latest evidence that the national sport safeguarding apparatus is not fit for its federally designated purpose: “prevent the abuse, including emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, of amateur athletes participating in amateur athletic activities through national governing bodies.”
However, the suits also bring to light several thornier issues.
First, they illustrate how the perception of a duty of care — one that Congress created in the aftermath of the Larry Nassar scandal — can generate a false sense of security. (RELATED: Washington’s Reverse Midas Touch)
The U.S. Center for SafeSport has “exclusive jurisdiction” over accusations of sexual misconduct in sport. When it chooses to do so, the Center can wield extraordinary power for a nominally private entity.
The Center can ban someone from sport, which, even on a temporary basis, can end their career as an athlete, coach, or other role in the industry. Such bans are public. The Ted Stevens Act requires the Center to “publish and maintain a publicly accessible internet website that contains a comprehensive list of adults who are barred by the Center.” This immediately and permanently associates banned sports people with Larry Nassar himself, one of the most notorious pedophiles in American history. That is a blow to one’s reputation that extends the damage beyond the sports industry. Yet even if the Center bans and blacklists someone erroneously, Congress granted them immunity from defamation suits. (RELATED: Defending Reputation From Defamation-by-Blacklist)
Knowing that Congress gave the Center both great power and great responsibility, many people think that it has equally great effectiveness.
Knowing that Congress gave the Center both great power and great responsibility, many people think that it has equally great effectiveness. They therefore trust that the Center will act promptly to investigate and adjudicate a complaint in order to protect youth athletes. However, both advocates and critics of the Center agree, with plenty of evidence to support them, that it does not.
Second, these suits show the danger of outsourcing personal responsibility. Time and again, the plaintiffs fault USA Gymnastics, the Center, the gym, and the gym owners for not informing law enforcement of the complaints against Gardner. They inadvertently paint a picture of concerned individuals saying, “Well, I did all I could. I told a responsible party and a mandatory reporter.”
It should go without saying that the Center’s “exclusive jurisdiction” only refers to the sporting context. Indeed, Gardner’s arrest proves that criminal law applies to the sports industry; and, obviously, so does civil law. (RELATED: The Limits of Delegation to the Private Sector)
Likewise, coaches, volunteers, and employees of youth sports organizations are all mandatory reporters. That is a unique responsibility that we carry. But it is not a unique power.
Neither the Center’s “exclusive jurisdiction” nor someone’s status as a mandatory reporter precludes anyone from bypassing the safeguarding system and picking up the phone to call the police, or going online to file a suspicious activity report with local, state, or federal law enforcement.
For all of the imprecations over the last 25 years of “If you see something, say something,” Americans’ ready use of tip-and-snitch lines during COVID, and the perilous ease of calling someone out on social media, these suits suggest a disturbing level of passivity around one of the few behaviors that is universally condemned.
Yet no one seems to have reached the necessary threshold of concern, impatience, or anger to go directly to law enforcement.
If the police were informed and failed to act, then that is a separate and serious scandal. But that brings us to the third point: the entire Sean Gardner situation shows that there is no substitute for the criminal justice system.
The criminal justice system is far from perfect — some of the long lags in the Gardner case raise their own questions. But when you need to get a monster off the streets — and if Gardner did the things he is accused of, he is a monster — you need police with guns, courts with judges and juries, and prisons with walls. Not a 501(c)3 in Denver.
Nearly five years passed between the Center and USA Gymnastics’ first learning that Gardner might be a sexual abuser and the Center informing law enforcement. In that time, there were at least three separate complaints to the Center about Gardner.
The complaint of March 2022 seems to have spurred something, as the Center informed the West Des Moines Police Department of the situation in May. The Center took its own action, the “temporary suspension,” two months later, in July. According to an FBI affidavit, another two years went by before the police interviewed a potential victim, and yet another year had passed before West Des Moines police searched Gardner’s property in May 2025. But things took off from there, leading to his arrest in August.
Those lags will be frustrating, infuriating, or agonizing, depending on your perspective. If you’re idealistic, you might aver that such delays are sometimes the cost of due process and the protections we provide the accused. But the U.S. Center for SafeSport is encumbered by no such due process strictures, yet it still took them nearly twice as long to do anything as the police.
Only when the proper law enforcement bodies were brought into the case did the wheels start turning to truly protect children from Sean Gardner and try him for these crimes.
Even if it worked perfectly, a sport safeguarding system could do neither. The actual safeguarding system we have, exclusively led by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, can barely go through the motions.
And even though the criminal justice system does not in any way work perfectly, it is the best we have.
Delayed justice for Sean Gardner and his victims is evidence of all of that.
READ MORE from George M.J. Perry:
Maintain the Separation Between Sport and State
British Sports Scoop the NCAA in Protecting Female Athletes
The Limits of Delegation to the Private Sector
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